Word: mao
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...struggle with the Gang of Four: I let the Gang of Four grab my tail and give me a sound flogging. Perhaps you comrades would say that it was Chairman Mao who relieved me of my former jobs and dismissed me from office. As a matter of fact, it wasn't so. I would rather call it a decree of fate. Chiang Ch'ing used to laugh at me, saying that my head was bullet-shaped and couldn't wear official headgear securely ... As long as class struggle exists, there will be persons like the Gang...
...mistakes (in the mid-'60s): No one is free from shortcomings. Take, for example, people like us, our cadres doing political work and our veteran cadres who have been in the party for decades. Do we not also have shortcomings or errors of this kind or that? Chairman Mao often errs too. But we all know that his errors are fewer than ours...
...other early visitors to the Celestial Kingdom returned home with tales of teeming millions, exotic landscapes, seemingly outlandish manners and morals. Even today some Americans have a vision of China that is a fanciful montage of antithetical images: Confucius and Kung Fu; Wellesley-educated Madame Chiang Kai-shek and Mao's "sinister" widow Chiang Ch'ing; highborn ladies tiptoeing painfully on bound feet and unisex masses marching in bulky Mao jackets; delicately misty watercolors and propaganda posters as crude as comic strips; hundred-year-old eggs and gunpowder; opium dens and Buddhist pagodas; the imperturbable mandarin sage...
Still, the official moralistic ethic-it might almost be called Puritan-prevails. China's leaders inveigh against the licentious life-style of the imperial past. When Mao's widow Chiang Ch'ing first came under attack, she was frequently portrayed as a latter-day Empress Wu Tse-t'ien, whose career began in the 7th century as a 13-year-old court concubine and ended in an orgy of sex and assassination. Another execrated royal personage is the 8th century Emperor Hsüan Tsung, who was hopelessly enamored of a shapely concubine, Yang Kuei...
...Mao's overriding ambition was to rid China of all traces of its decadent past, while at the same time transforming the Chinese national character. His instrument was a vast totalitarian party and police apparatus that reaches into every facet of daily life, that controls what a Chinese can read, where he can travel, how he should live. Despite the omnipresence of this Orwellian machinery, many practices of the feudal past are observed. In the privacy of their homes, there are many peasant families who still pray to Kuan-yin, the goddess of mercy, and burn incense to their...